Cracks in the Temple of Justice

 By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan

Transfers, scandals and a fraying trust between India's judges and its lawyers point to a judiciary under strain

For decades Indians have treated their judiciary as a "temple of justice"—the last resort in a democracy where other institutions are often seen as compromised. That reputation is now being tested. A string of episodes over the past year, from opaque judicial transfers to allegations of settlements brokered for a rape case, has exposed friction between the bench, the bar and the public it is meant to serve. The clubby culture that once bound judges and advocates together is fraying, and in its place has grown a climate of administrative secrecy and executive encroachment that critics say threatens the independence of the courts.

Musical chairs

Much of the anxiety centres on the collegium system, under which senior judges decide on the appointment and transfer of their peers, using powers granted by Article 222 of the constitution. Bar associations, including that of the Delhi High Court, have complained that transfers under this system now happen frequently and with little warning, unsettling the institutions they touch. To reformers, this is not a mere administrative quibble. Judges moved without consultation take with them what one bar association calls "institutional memory"—familiarity with local law and local litigants that helps courts run smoothly. Uprooting them, the argument goes, widens the gap between judges and the communities they serve, treating jurists as interchangeable staff rather than custodians of local justice.

When the bench protects the accused

The starker allegations concern conduct, not process. District judges Sanjiv Kumar Singh and Anil Kumar Singh are reported to have pressed a 27-year-old junior lawyer to withdraw a rape complaint against her senior advocate, in exchange for a settlement worth Rs.30 Lakhs . The victim has alleged she was introduced to a sitting High Court judge by the accused as part of that pressure. A "Full Court" meeting eventually led to the suspension of the district judges. But the case has left a harder question hanging: if judges themselves can act as brokers for the accused, how far does the rot extend?

A lollipop for the lawyers

Executive interference has taken a subtler form elsewhere. A notification—backed by Delhi's lieutenant-governor and endorsed by the federal home minister, Amit Shah—now allows witness testimony to be recorded by video link from inside police stations, placing witnesses under police supervision at a delicate stage of trial. Advocate Mahmood Pracha calls the episode a "lollipop": nearly 100,000 lawyers went on strike over the policy, only for their leaders to be talked down by a letter from a junior official in the police commissioner's office—a document with no legal standing against the original notification. The protest evaporated; the policy remains.

Credentials, unchecked

Vetting has proved just as porous. Judge Bhagu Prasad Routray of the Odisha High Court sits on a constitutional bench despite allegations, now circulating publicly, that his law degree is fraudulent. Bar leaders argue that such cases are the predictable result of an appointments process that prizes deference to the executive—"face value," as one advocate put it—over scrutiny of merit. Cut the bar out of elevations, they say, and the judiciary loses the filter that once caught such anomalies.

Transfer as discipline

A further pattern troubles lawyers most of all: the use of transfer as a quiet substitute for discipline. Rumours of misconduct caught on CCTV in the Delhi High Court have, on several occasions, been followed by a judge's transfer rather than any public inquiry or prosecution—prompting the Allahabad High Court Bar to protest that its court is not a "dumping ground" for judges accused of corruption elsewhere, citing large sums of cash allegedly involved in one such case. Bar associations are now demanding general body meetings to force such matters into the open, arguing that if a judge is unfit for one bench, the remedy is impeachment or prosecution, not reassignment.

The bar as last line of defence

None of these episodes alone would threaten an institution as old as India's judiciary. Together, they describe a system in which the executive's reach is growing, the collegium remains largely closed to the profession it draws from, and the bar—by its own account, the "mother" from which judges spring—finds itself sidelined as a spectator. Lawyers speak more openly than before of a nationwide strike. Whether that pressure yields greater transparency, or simply confirms the bar's marginal role, may decide something larger than any one scandal: whether justice in India remains a right available to all, or drifts toward becoming a privilege managed by the powerful.